The new fall TV lineup: academic edition

30 September 2011

ABC: Co-eds

The year is 1960; the place is East Northern Normal College, where all the faculty look like the management of Sterling Cooper, except with more Burt Coopers and fewer Roger Sterlings. Can you believe that female students wore pearls and gloves, male students wore crisp shirts and ties, and everyone smoked during class? The dashing young English professor, Dan Delaney, is new on the job and the co-eds’ hearts are all a-flutter — and without prohibitions on professor-student dating, he’s got his pick. Will he date a different girl every week? Will his heart be captured by the curvy blonde from the wrong side of the tracks (and a reputation to match!) or will he finally turn his eye to the dark-haired, scholarly and deserving Jackie? Guaranteed to be free of feminist criticism of the era, as well as absent of black characters aside from the occasional feisty cafeteria lady.

TNT: The Daily

Welcome to the fast-paced, life-or-death world of a daily college newspaper! Headed by editor-in-chief Janice Katoovian, a 40-something MILF who’s finally finishing her degree, The Daily Student has a tough staff of writers and photographers — and worst of all is the team of Duke Stanford, the frat-guy sports writer from an oil-drilling family, and Josh Holtzmann, the whip-smart political writer and editorialist who thinks he should be editor-in-chief. As Janice faces sexist and undermining fights with Stanford and Holtzmann, she must build the staff’s confidence in her leadership and uncover weekly university controversies and mysteries — while facing obstruction from her ex-husband, the Dean of Student Affairs.

Lifetime: ButHow Will She Finish Her Conference Paper? (TV movie)

Sociology professor Elegancia (Elle) Morton has to finish a conference paper on “American Satanism” for that meeting in Omaha, but then she discovers that her daughter is actually being seduced into Satanism at the hands of her shady middle-aged neighbor Dwayne. As the conference deadline approaches, Elle spirals down into the temptations of promiscuous sex and Satanic worship — and we discover she has a dark secret of her own.

PBS: Mansfield Abbey University

Set in 1904, the faculty of Mansfield Abbey University are thrown into a tizzy when the president retires without naming a successor. Meanwhile, the rest of the support staff — secretaries, cooks, librarians — experience roiling battles and jealousies of their own. What will be the future of Mansfield Abbey when the faculty and staff hear that the new president will be a commoner, educated not at Oxbridge but at an American school called “Rutgers” (offering many opportunities for faculty snobs to mistake it for “rot-gut” and “rug-rat”)? Teacups are rattling!

CNN’s new partner network: FNN

FNN is built on the preposition that “the best disinfectant is sunlight” — and thus we present this network entirely dedicated to televising faculty and administration meetings. No longer hidden behind closed doors, those meetings can be revelatory. Do you want to know why Northern Tech University is cancelling teaching assistants for any undergraduate class with fewer than 120 students? How about the details of exactly how to insert your code to use the faculty xerox machine, or the dean’s meeting with the chemistry department to propose eliminating those costly labs and prohibitively expensive safety equipment? Learn why faculty everywhere are crying out: “Give us an F!” when they hear about FNN!

GLORIA SWANSON

2013 film & TV reviewed (with occasional late 2012 films)

Side Effects
House of Cards
The Invisible War
How to Survive a Plague
5 Broken Cameras
The Americans
Blancanieves
Top of the Lake
The Great Gatsby
Stories We Tell
The East
Before Midnight
A Girl and a Gun
The Bridge
The Bling Ring
The Heat
Elysium
In a World...
Orange is the New Black
The Fifth Estate
Enough Said
Populaire
The Wall
The Act of Killing
Twelve Years a Slave